HP Discover 2011 was very informative in relation to some of the new storage strategy that HP has laid for its future. Hearing some keynotes, coffee talks and having one on one meetings with HP execs, you start hearing a consist message of integration across their storage, systems and networking business, a converged strategy. We have been staying close and watching HP for the past year and a half having attended the Storage Tech Days, Blades Day and some other events, we have previously heard the messages around converged infrastructures strategy.

Now after a few of these events and HP Discover 2011, it’s quite visible the direction HP is moving towards, It is not about just messaging but a fair amount of execution around these platforms. I truly think the team that has been brought in and runs their Enterprise Storage, Systems and Networking business is working very hard to make a big impact within HP on integrating these business units and sharing technology innovations with a common goal between these business units, which would help make a big impact to all HP customers.

The Converged storage strategy within HP is no news now, even the branding around their Storage business has now been changed from StorageWorks to HP Storage. HP natively had HP EVA and HP MSA platforms, over the last few years they have acquired technologies like Lefthand, IBRIX and 3Par. Trying to keep these platforms independent and support engineering teams across these platforms would be a challenge in itself with heavy cost of managing these products and possibly have conflicting messages to the internal sales teams and the customer base.

At HP Discover they announced their Converged storage strategy for the platforms they have acquired over the past few years, into a single code base offering customers a much needed flexibility. The Store 360 strategy within HP is all about sharing the common code base, features, from its StoreOnce dedup platform, IBRIX Scalable NAS platform and LeftHand VSA platform. These platforms will share the same Linux kernel going forward and have joint development teams, integrating all of these platforms into the Proliant Server commodity hardware. Each of these platforms will still manage and maintain it’s unique features and integrate within HP’s Virtual System and Cloud System offering.

It is very visible, 3Par will follow the same route in the near future with integration of 3Par technology into HP’s Proliant Server – common commodity hardware platform and preserve some custom ASIC’s during the first few iterations, then eventually move towards a total Intel based platform eliminating ASIC’s by robust software features.

So compared to HP’s converged strategy for it Storage platforms, we see a contradictory move by it’s competition towards a unified storage strategy. With Netapp and EMC who are todays prominent storage players, they have focused their resources towards building Unified storage with Federation and other features for the customers.

Non of HP platforms today neither their Store 360 strategy seems to focus towards Unified Storage, they have independent platforms for their SAN and NAS offerings. These are various (different) building blocks for the customer needs and not one box fits all use case strategy. The consolidation of File and Block storage on the current WAFL based systems and VNX systems is a unified strategy that is being pushed very hard by NetApp and EMC respectively. Both EMC and NetApp have gone to a commodity hardware based platform using the Intel Architecture, further consolidating their products to offer both File and Block storage into a single product.

It’s too hard and probably too early to say who the winners will be in the game. But one thing we learned at HP Discover was HP is totally focused on it’s converged storage strategy and throwing resources towards building a matrix of systems that clearly integrates it’s Networking, Systems and Storage products into a common platform that customers can deploy in/as private or public clouds.

HP Discover 2011 was quite a busy event. With attending sessions, keynotes, discussions and coffee talk, it has kept the information flow going. During this time we also had a chance to do a few Podcast, Videocast and blog about the messaging we where hearing from HP. .

We had a chance to share some thoughts with David Scott, Lee Johns and other HP execs on the HP Storage (Converged Strategy).

Here are a few discussions that happened this week and may have been recorded by other fellow bloggers.

– 20 pb of storage shipped everyday at HP
– do more with less
– enterprise IT as a service
– converged infrastructure lead in the market
– similar impact should be following next
– storage works retired – brand name
– HP Storage is the brand name
– acquisition of 3par was very important towards the future
– multi tenancy
– 3par and it’s innovation in storage technology
– typical management cost on 3par is 90% less than other typical storage platforms
– most storage technology architecture build 15 to 20 years ago
– unified storage is not simple enough to implement, manage, cost, scale, etc
– HP converged blade system and integrating that in storage
– scale out storage using these principles
– ibrix, store once and lefthand into a single code base in storage 360 strategy
– easy deployment
– converged utility storage, addresses security and other elements
– today utility storage includes 3par, ibrix and lefthand in the future
– next generation EVA
– personal note, EVA is not dead
– Eva generation 5 released, p6000 series
– new Eva software environments
– small form factor drives and solid state drives
– 8 gb backend and 10gb interconnect switching
– new ibrix released
– 16pb namespace
– ibrix is strategic platform for big everything platform
– vertica acquisition is very strategic for HP as well
– big healthcare applications that can be deployed on ibrix and vertica for data mining and Analytics
– Charlie Lemming, vp Brocade takes the stage
– brocade’s 14 year long partnership
– Charlie says, great and new exciting things going on at Brocade, not sure what to make out of it
– announcements on converged systems which include HP virtual system, HP cloud system, HP app system
– Carl Eschenbach from VMware takes stage
– Carl receives the HP alliance award from HP on behalf of VMware
– Brad Anderson from Microsoft takes the stage
– Microsoft also receives HP alliance for solutions award
– Joe Crawford, enterprise cloud services at Verizon takes the stage
– verizon has been using 3par storage since 2005
– computing as a service offered by Verizon, I believe this would be the Terremark division
– rapid deployment, ease of manageability, same number of IT administrators since deployment with all the business growth
– Verizon thinks the 3par acquisition is very strategic for customers
– Convergence is a much better approach then the unified storage that other competitors are offering today

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The opinions expressed here are my - StorageNerve opinions. This blog and the content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer (Accenture) or clients and does not reflect their views and opinions.